


Let's Rearrange

by anonymous_scapegoat



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, I do not regret it, is it really angst if i'm laughing writing it, this narrative voice is made of sarcasm and the influence of lemony snicket and frankly??
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-19 14:09:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9444812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_scapegoat/pseuds/anonymous_scapegoat
Summary: Everyone's struggling. They do their best to hold each other up.{the title is from "over my head" by the fray which i thought was kind of witty bc shiro is/was the head but that's also sad whoops}





	1. A Prelude

In the weeks after Shiro disappears,five things happen.

1\. Keith – in keeping with the wishes of Shiro and everyone else – takes over as the black lion’s paladin. Lance – sharpshooter, adaptable as the ocean - takes the red. Allura – over Coran’s many and varied and loud protests – takes the blue. It’s stressful. They all snap a lot more often than they used to. They’re all tired. Keith doubts himself more often and sometimes he spends hours in his room alone or entire days in the training room. Someone always comes and finds him and wraps the blisters on his hands. He's not a big talker, but sometimes if they ply him with enough space goop or a training match he'll unload on someone. He doesn't want to talk, he's got work to do, training to do, bonding to do, he's tired or restless or angry. But they're there - they try. 

2\. Pidge starts forgetting to eat. And sleep. A lot. Everyone had noticed it was a habit of hers before and made a concentrated effort to drag her into the kitchen at least three times a day, but now it’s much harder to get her to take any kind of breaks from her work (whether that work is cracking code or updating everyone’s lions simultaneously or aggressively taking care of the rest of the team because she can’t stop worrying about another one of them disappearing). She's busy, she's busy, she's fixing parts of the ship or making Hunk's lion more maneuverable - because that asteroid yesterday was _way_ too close for comfort - or making it about everyone else, always. She's stubborn.They keep trying, though.

3\. In keeping withitem two, Hunk starts stress baking. And love baking. And just – all kinds of baking. Cooking, too. It makes him feel relaxed, and every once in a while he’ll hit some kind of peanut-butter-reminiscent sweet spot that gets Pidge to sit down for twenty minutes _before_ her hands start shaking from exhaustion. Of course, when one keeps waking up in the middle of the night to cook space lasagna because one keeps having nightmares about alien armies attacking one in one’s home, disabling one’s fighting machine, and leaving one entirely helpless as one’s loved ones are killed, people get concerned by theshadows under one’s eyes. But they all eat plenty of space lasagna and every once in a while one of them will take a night shift in the kitchen to walk him back to bed. He's busy, he's busy, he's getting a head start on something for tomorrow or he just had this really great idea or he's making it about everyone else, always. Theydo their best, though. 

4\. In keeping withitems one through three, Lance just… stays Lance. And that’s all any of them can ask for. He makes jokes and he argues with Keith periodically to release the tangible tension that keeps swelling in the bridge of the ship and he makes fun of Pidge just to get a rise out of her and make her look away from her computer and he pulls Hunk away from the stove he just burned himself on at one in the morning and turns on some weird space music and dances with him like they used to at the Garrison before making him go to sleep. And he stops flirting with Allura anymore but he keeps up this bizarre kind of banter with her that no one quite gets but they all appreciate (he once, on the rare occasion that they’re all together, compares Allura piloting Blue to Allura dating his ex, or possibly tojoining in a polyamorous relationship with him, Blue, and Red - which means Keith's in on it, too! - and Hunk laughs space milk out of his nose and Keith’s mouth trembles for way less time than it normally does before he starts laughing too – maybe it’s the sleep deprivation), and he helps Coran with ship repairs, too. He spends a lot of time in the map room. He hurts and he misses when he could send his moms letters and when Shiro was his idol and not his friend that he was grieving or not grieving or something because who knew if he was actually dead? Some nights when he’s there Hunk and Pidge wander up from the lab/landing bay and Hunk hugs him so he can feel the pressure of it while Pidge not-watches awkwardly and radiates affection in her own way and then they all go up to bed together. He feels like they really don’t have to do that with everything that's been going on but he appreciates it anyway. Of course theyhave to - he's theirs.

5\. They adjust. It's hard, and they're all scared, and no one quite knows how this is going to work out. But they take care of each other. They adjust. They have to. 


	2. Pidge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge looks at both of them skeptically, one eye narrowed slightly more than the other, one eyebrow raised, which means, “who exactly do you think you’re talking to here and why do you think I would want to talk to anyone about anything at all ever?”

Hunk finishes up stuttering his way through a mother hen routine made vaguely successful solely due to the fact that he is able to physically remove both Keith and Allura from the training deck. Carrying a pissed off Galra over one shoulder and a pissed off Altean over the other is not fun, he finds, but someone has to do it – they can be mad at him after they’ve eaten something and gotten at least 6 hours of sleep.

So, he’s done with that. He figures he might catch a nap himself – assuming he can – assuming he isn’t caught up in some other nightmare about god-knows-what this time – assuming – y’know, maybe he’d better just hit up the workshop and futz with some old Altean tech junk. Yeah, that’s probably a good idea, because if Pidge is there he can gently bully her into doing something that looks like self care too. 

He stops by the kitchen first – carrying your friends who are aliens and who are also trying to kill you is thirsty work and he needs some water, or some space Gatorade, or – do aliens have electrolytes? – what would constitute space Gatorade? – he probably needs some sleep – and there he finds Lance, rummaging through the pantry. Space pantry. Spantry. Definitely he needs sleep.

Lance emerges from the spantry – heheh – with something like eight boxes of cracker-like things and Hunk isn’t even surprised, because Lord knows that boy can eat like no one Hunk’s ever seen.

“Hey, Hunk!” Lance jumps when he turns around. Hunk never used to be able to sneak up on him like that, and he really did used to try – Lance was always really proud of that, especially since Hunk himself was so easily startled. Probably Lance needs sleep, too.

“Hey.” Hunk grabs some blue drink that he hopes isn’t alcoholic and then seats himself on the counter next to Lance before cracking it open. 

“You finally get Keith and Allura to give it a rest?” Lance asks, really going at it trying to break through the truly impressive airtight Altean packaging on cracker box number one.

“Yeah, eventually – who knew either of them could put up such a fight after eight straight hours sparring?”

Hunk sighs and pulls on his (cotton candy-flavored) drink before pressing his lips together and widening his eyes – this expression means “I am thinking negative thoughts about someone but I’m not about to start shit.” It also means “I super wish my friends would take better care of themselves, given they hold the fate of the entire universe in their shaking-because-of-sleep-deprivation hands.”

Funnily enough, Hunk never had much use for such an expression before being launched into space in a giant lion.

“Yeah, well, everyone knows those two run on pure spite,” Lance says. He waits for Hunk to laugh, which he does, genuinely. “Hey, speaking of spite, have you seen Pidge lately?”

“Hah – I was actually just about to look for her, see if I can annoy her into taking a nap or something,” Hunk says, dismounting the counter.

Lance had been just about to start cracker box number three, but he jumps down too.

“Want company?” he asks. “You alone aren’t anywhere near annoying enough to get _Pidge_ to take a break.”

There is a brief moment where they both pause and they don’t know whether to laugh or cry because how did everything get so broken? But then Hunk huffs air out his nose in a way that means “I am amused at your morbid gallows humor but actual laughter would imply a devolution into hysteria, which neither of us can afford at the present moment,” and they meander down towards the makeshift workshop in the landing bay.

Unsurprisingly, Pidge is there. Surprisingly, Pidge is not working.

 Pidge is, in fact, cursing very loudly, head in her hands, sat in a corner with her elbows resting on her knees and her knees drawn up to her chest. Her shoulders are shaking.

The concern Hunk feels is more than mild. The glance he exchanges with Lance borders on panic. Pidge has always been solid, at the very least. She’d had bad habits and unsorted priorities and an awful fear of abandonment that had her checking teammates’ rooms in the middle of the night to be sure they were still there, but still. An emotional breakdown had been so low on the list of things any of the paladins expected out of her it was subterranean.

Clearly they all need to reevaluate their lists.

“Pidge?” Lance is the first to speak, which is good because Hunk has some space Gatorade stuck in his throat or something and he can’t quite breathe around it. Lance’s voice is quiet but Pidge looks up like she’s been shocked, striking the back of her hand across her cheeks and smearing tears away as though it’ll hide how red and glassy her eyes are.

It’s easy, it’s so easy, to forget how young Pidge is. She’s usually brazen and mouthy in a way that more than makes up for their differences in both age (not too earth-shattering, a year or two) and stature (much more significant). But now she just looks… small. In this moment she’s made of tired shadows under her eyes swallowing half her face and trembling fingers and shattered glass. She looks like a broken bird.

She looks broken.

Hunk is caught up in this awful thought cycle of _maybe she is_.

His head is on an endless loop of _Pidge laying on Keith’s back because he likes feeling the weight and listening to him talk and rant and be scared and then coming right back with something matter-of-fact and indisputable that sometimes snaps him out of his current self-destructive cycle and sometimes doesn’t but always gets him back on his feet_ and _Pidge doing room checks at two in the morning and finding Hunk caught up in another dreamscape he can’t break free of and waking him up and pressing his fingers to the pulse point at her wrist whispering **shh, I’m alive and so are you**_ and _Pidge designing long-range weapons hardware for the red lion to make Lance feel more at home because Actual Home is such a far-off concept she can’t even see it anymore but she knows how to grab it by the roots and drag it along with her, even if it stretches,_ and _Pidge pulling Allura away from the bridge under the pretense of a makeover, discretely coding Galra-tracking algorithms the whole time she’s getting her mascara done_ and _Pidge listening to Coran talk about Altea because it makes him happy and it fascinates her_ and _Pidge up late, late, late worrying_ and _Pidge up late, late, late working, searching for her family, repairing the castle_ and Pidge with gears rusted and corroding and doing her best to take care of them and everything else anyway and-

They can’t afford to loose her. She can’t be broken because – because that would mean everything is.

And Pidge is just a _kid_ and this is _too much_ for her and Hunk is _so_ _angry_ because _none_ of them deserved this.

So he does the only thing he can think to do. He crosses the room in four steps, drops to the ground next to her, and hugs her. Tight. Pidge is not a touchy person usually but Hunk feels like she might need some holding together.

She turns, buries her face in his chest. He can tell she’s listening to his heartbeat from the angle her head is at – and it occurs to him that he had never actually stopped to think that maybe she was comforted by that rhythm in the same way he is. Her shoulders are still shaking. She grabs at the back of his t-shirt like Hunk’s the one who needs holding together. Like maybe if she holds on tight enough she can just make everything okay.

Hunk can feel her trying to regulate her breathing as Lance sits down on Pidge’s other side. Lance doesn’t touch her, because too many people touching her at once can get overwhelming for Pidge, but he makes sure she knows he’s there. He hums a song that Hunk knows he learned from one of his moms ages ago.

Eventually, she’s composed herself enough to lean back, push her glasses onto her head, and press her knuckles into her eye sockets before wiping off her face. Lance hands her a rag he’s scrounged up from God-knows-where, and she takes it, gratefully. She sniffles, briefly, takes a deep breath, then slumps back against one of the walls forming their little corner, glasses falling back onto her nose.

“So,” Hunk starts, in a tone that is way too upbeat for the current conversation, “d’you… wanna talk about it?”

“You should probably talk about it,” Lance tacks on.

Pidge looks at both of them skeptically, one eye narrowed slightly more than the other, one eyebrow raised, which means, “who exactly do you think you’re talking to here and why do you think I would want to talk to anyone about anything at all ever?”

“It’s part of the healing process – we don’t make the rules.” Hunk shrugs.

Hunk idly wonders when he and Lance became the team dads. He guesses it doesn’t matter, anyway.

“I don’t-“ Pidge starts, cutting herself off to clear her throat. “I- I don’t…” At this point she releases all the air in her lungs on one frustrated sigh.

“C’mon, Pidge,” Lance wheedles, “you gotta let it ou-“

“I don’t _deserve_ this,” Pidge mutters.

“Come again?” Hunk’s pretty sure he heard that right but he’s having trouble understanding. Sometimes Pidge is dramatic – along the lines of “what awful things have I done to deserve you two pestering me please leave me to be a computer gremlin on my own” which is a direct quote – but this doesn’t feel like that.

“Y-you two keep helping me, and- and all of you are like a second _family_ to me, but – I still haven’t found my dad and Matt, and the Galra are destroying the universe and- I’m not doing _enough_!” Pidge buries her face in her hands. “And- and people around us keep _dying_? Like- like Thace and Ulnaz and the Arusians and everyone else who’s helped us and…

“I just- Like- there are things that are important, right? Like, the universe, and you guys, and my blood family. And- and Voltron and all the planets we rescue. And I just – I feel like I should be doing more? I do my best to keep you guys safe, and the universe safe, and I’ve been trying to track down Matt and my dad for months now, but they might be dying _too_ , and nothing I’m doing is _enough_. I don’t know what I’m – what I’m doing _wrong_? And it’s not fair that I get to sit here and be safe and okay and fine when nobody else gets to and I don’t deserve it, I haven’t _earned_ it and they’re all dead and I-” 

Pidge doesn’t get to finish because Hunk has this _feeling_ that the next words out of her mouth were going to be “should be” and he doesn’t think he could handle that right now. So he just sort of – grabs her, and hugs her again, and shoves her face into his shoulder at an angle that probably won’t suffocate her.

Lance quickly follows, sandwiching Pidge between the two of them. She’s shaking, or Hunk is shaking, or Lance is shaking, or maybe they all are. It’s hard to tell.

“ _You_ -“ Hunk starts, voice wobbling because he is maybe crying but that’s fine, “you are alive. And have every right to be.”

“Jeez, kid,” Lance says, “you’re still fighting, aren’t you? That’s more than most of the types we find out here.” He leans back from Pidge and sighs. Keeps a hand on her shoe because it’s pressure without skin contact and he knows her well enough to know it’ll help.

Pidge slowly disentangles herself from Hunk, wiping cotton fibers out of her mouth from when Hunk had shoved her face into his shirt mid-sentence. She rubs at her face again, settling her glasses on the top of her head. She sighs, lets her head drop back against the wall with a _thump_ that Hunk knows she finds satisfying but makes him wince.

“You’re right,” she says, whooshing out another deep breath. “I’m fighting, I can’t let this get in the way of that.”

“That… wasn’t _exactly_ what I meant, bud,” Lance says, glancing at her sidelong. Hunk makes a face.

“I _know_ what you meant, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, _bud_.” Pidge rolls her eyes. “I gotta get back to work.” 

She climbs to her feet, turns and faces them, and sets her left and right hands on Hunk’s and Lance’s heads respectively. She pats twice, gently, in some strange Pidge gratitude ritual, before turning and running out of the workshop – probably in the direction of her room.

“Try and take a nap at some point, maybe?” Hunk calls after her.

“Yeah, sure, _Dad._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> help me that took so long to write how does one set and and enforce writing deadlines but also write well - anywho, hope u like it
> 
> still lookin for a beta ! ^^

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how many chapters I'm doing, tbqh. However many it takes for all of them to get to Suffer(TM), probably, bcos that's my shit. Other than that, who knows? If you wanna request anything, go for it!
> 
> Oh! Also I'm looking for a beta, if anyone's interested? I check grammar pretty obsessively on my own but extra eyes never hurt, esp. for checking continuity ^^"


End file.
